Description :

Cadastral plans, mortage registry, Registration, State-owned land and property, non tax Revenue or management of State property, imply the use by the General Administration of Patrimonial Documentation (GAPD) of a considerable number of data.

Interest in such data, beyond fiscal or administrative reasons, has become obvious for researchers from a scientific or contractual point of view.

Meanwhile, the GAPD data are not easily exploitable outside their current internal use. This is probably due to both the form in which they are available and the lack of inventory at scientists’ disposal.

The OSIRIS project aims at making data dissemination operational. A consortium made up of three research teams from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Institute for Environmental Management and Territorial Planning), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Interface Demography) and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Institute for Social and Economic Geography) are thus in charge of responding the following objectives:

- Making the contents of the databases usable as statistical tool (definitions, data value classification…).
- Checking if new variables can be created from available data, with a view to aid decision in territorial management in a broad sense.

The necessary steps to achieve the project can be synthesized as follows:

- Assessment of the pertinence and completeness of the current GAPD databases, on the basis of a qualitative inventory
- Study of the availability and accessibility of data
- Identification of pertinent and/or recurrent expectations from scientists and academics in relation to the GAPD data
- Examination of European data in order to make Belgian data consistent with European standards, notably in accordance with the EUROSTAT methodology
- In connection with the implementation of the OSIRIS platform, working out of a conceptual model of pertinent data and integration of the latter according to EU directives
- Identification of pilot projects to be implemented on the OSIRIS platform and achievement of the feasibility study
- Building of primary statistical indexes and critical analysis
- Identification of the possibility of data exchange and cross-check with other public institutions (Belgian National Geographic Institute (NGI), FPS Economy Directorate-general Statistics Belgium...)

Eventually, the creation of an exchange interface should improve the dissemination, in a formalized way, of statistical and depersonalized data into the scientific world. The OSIRIS platform should offer scientists new research possibilities with regular result publication.